The gr8ful grind: Questions NO.s. 67 & 68

Let go of anger; It's an acid that eats away the delicate layers of your happiness

The reverse side has also its reverse side

Saturday, December 11, 2004

Questions NO.s. 67 & 68

Okay, it’s time to post the answers to the 3 questions game we’ve been playing. First of all, by asking more than 3 questions nonbeing wants to be able to play the game by other than the rules for everyone else. He better watch out or people will begin to think he’s American. We will leave it to just 3 questions.

Pearl wanted to know
1: What do you cherish most in my life so far?
Well I work hard on non-attachment, but I confess to being entirely human. I would say my family and friends.

2: What do you think has altered the course of your life so far?
Two things: drugs and the dharma. Drugs expanded my consciousness, while simultaneously causing me to be less than I could have otherwise been. I quit 20-some years ago, but the impact of both the pluses and minuses still linger; the dharma allows me to be a much better human being than I otherwise would have been.

3. What is my favorite ice cream flavor? Espresso.

Nonbeing asked:
1. How do I want to die?
First of all, I attempt to live in this moment. If one is always mentally involved with what has already occurred or what might happen in the future, once misses this moment, which is where our lives are actually lived. I can say that I have no fear of death. But I would guess the direct answer to your question is that I would hope I die with loving-kindness on my mind and in my heart to send me into the next incarnation and facilitate a fortunate rebirth.

2: What is the last thing you want to say to someone, just before you croaked.
‘Everything was beautiful, nothing hurt.’

3: What gives purpose of meaning to my life?
I take refuge in the Buddha, dharma and sangha. That having been said, service to others gives my life meaning, while music puts me in balance.

Justin asked:
1: What’s the best show you have ever seen?
Given the fact I have attended over 50 Grateful Dead shows, several dozen Little Feat shows, and scores of other shows by an infinite variety of other musical acts, plus played hundreds of shows in bands of my own, this is a tough one, especially since many of the hundreds upon hundreds of shows I attended or performed in were done in an altered state (Yes, I actually DID see the words come out of Garcia‘s mouth and swirl around my head on that January evening in 1970).

So, I’ll just talk about the 2 most memorable shows for me. (Note: This does not include the show after which I met Jerry Garcia alone in an elevator).

Show #1: I was in my early 20s. Clapton was God. He’d just left Cream and we heard he had a new group with Steve Winwood called Blind Faith that was coming to Portland. We bought tickets and attended. Blind Faith’s set was great, with Ginger Baker going nuts when the Portland cops pulled the pug on the electricity at 11:30 pm because of curfew issues. But what really made it memorable for me was one of the opening acts. The first opening act was good: it was a little 3-piece rock unit from Ireland with some guitar player I never heard of namedRory Gallagher, But it was the act just before Blind Faith that really blew me away. It was a large unit I’d never heard of before called Delany & Bonnie and Friends. They played incredibly great rock and blues; Bonnie’s voice and singing style made me cream my jeans, and the players. OMG, the players! (This was the first time I had ever heard of any of them) The lead guitar player was this strange white-haired, white-bearded guy named Leon Russell; the back-up singer was incredible and her name was Rita Cooledge (for whom Russell wrote Delta Lady); the piano player, bassist, and drummer would all become The Dominoes, as in Derek and…(Bobby Whitlock on piano, Carl Radle on bass, and Jim Keltner on drums); and the horn section was Jim Price and Bobby Keyes, the foundation of the Rolling Stones’ horn section for the past several decades. I was a puddle on the floor when that band finished it’s set.

The other show was June 12, 1980, a couple of weeks after the initial cataclysmic eruption of Mt. St. Helens. Paramount Theater. Grateful Dead. The second set started with drums, very unusual. And both drummers really got into it, calling up the spirits from incredible depths. This morphed into an extended Scarlet Begonias and jam. Then, without stopping they went into Fire On The Mountain. As they began Fire, I was thinking ‘Wow, they haven’t stopped since they began the set. I looked down at my watch and noticed it was 9:04 pm exactly as they began Fire without a single pause. After the show, we filed out of the Paramount and it was snowing! In June! Only, it wasn’t cold. Yet it was snowing and there was over an inch of snow on the ground. As we waded out into the snow, we realized it wasn’t snow at all. It was volcanic ash. The mountain had erupted again and the winds had blown the ash across the Columbia into Portland. We drove home through the stuff and as I read the paper the next morning, it said the mountain had had a huge eruption beginning at …wait for it…9:07 pm. The boys had called up Pele. The drummers no doubt had awoken her and Fire On The Mountain had enticed her to twirl along. Those guys!!!!!!

2: What is the most beautiful place in these states to live?
I hafta say for many, many years, I would have answered that if I didn’t live in Oregon (which is an incredible place to live!), I would want to live in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Mystical, beautiful, hypnotic. But that was before I spent all those vacations in Lahaina. Love that town. (Did I ever tell you about the time I stood at the urinal next to John Sebastion only go out into the club and see George Harrison and Elton John?) But Maui is too expensive. If I could live anywhere and chose to live in the US, I suppose I would seriously hafta look at living in Eugene, OR. But for sheer beauty, it’s a tough one. Certainly, a very good case could be made for either the Black Hills, Lahaina, and Sedona, AZ.

3: If I could sit down and eat dinner with any historical figure, dead or alive, who would it be? Why?
My Libra scales really come into play with this one. I’ve been with my share of celebraties from my time as a professional musician and as a journalist: Meredith Wilson, Bob Hope, Flip Wilson, Richard Pryor, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, just to name a few. Garcia? Thomas Jefferson? Ajan Chah? In the end, it’s very obvious. Provided we could speak a language that we both could understand very, very well, it would be Buddha. To have instruction, receive answers, bask in his glow.

Thanks for playing.....

13 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi! I just found your blog....and I'm glad I did...:) I haven't finished all the archives yet, but have enjoyed what I've read. I especially love your photos...absolutely awesome! I'm so happy to be an Oregonian...:) Keep up the good work, eh? xx

7:55 PM  
Blogger Gr8fulTed said...

Thanks, whomever you are....

10:19 PM  
Blogger Pearl Pocock said...

Wow, Way Cool, Thanks.

9:53 PM  
Blogger Pearl Pocock said...

I have to ask, if we were to reciprocate, what would your 3 questions be of us ?

9:57 PM  
Blogger Gr8fulTed said...

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. I'll hafta think on that one. Watch this space over the next day or so and I'll come up with them.

6:31 AM  
Blogger Gr8fulTed said...

Okay, here goes:

1: How does Butterball get that little red thingy to pop up at the perfect time when the turkey's done?

2: How could 59,054,087 voters be that full of fear to vote that way?

3: If Miss Issippi had a new jersey, what would Della ware?

3:01 PM  
Blogger Pearl Pocock said...

Ted, as your questions were more research related than personal, you invited my professional self (part of my income is derived via research) so I conducted 20 minutes of inquiry and can offer you enlightenment.

1: How does Butterball get that little red thingy to pop up at the perfect time when the turkey's done?


My experience is exclusive to Tofurkies, so I was compelled to confer directly with the confident kitchen consultants of Butterball (the one I spoke with seemed to have one of those red pop up thangies firmly lodged up her butt). She declared very proudly that they do not, in fact, use those pop up thangies with their superior turkeys. Furthermore, they discourage the use of them. She declared earnestly that the plastic thangys are too easily displaced during the turkey's many josslings from the store, to freezer, to counter, to pan etc, etc, etc. (It sure sounded to me like they are just sore that they didn't come up with that promotional item first and that maybe they take their birds a leetle too seriously.)

That said, it seems that the pop up mechanism is activated when a heat sensitive metal attains the necessary temperature to lose its grip on the spring loaded rod. …I'm definitely sticking to the side dishes. See here for full details and diagrams.

2: How could 59,054,087 voters be that full of fear to vote that way?

I like to assume that people are doing their best—that if they do great harm then I console myself that they didn't intend to, but are working from a deficiency. Kohlberg, a moral theorist, would say that most people don't attain a level of moral development beyond that of adherence to the authority of g-d and country (level 3). Given his thesis and my assumption that people are trying their best, if the propaganda machine spins well towards this g-d & country hierarchy of values (as they did) they will always win the race. (Note that Kohlberg classed himself in a minority group at the uppermost level of his scale with Ghandi, Jesus, Buddha and all the most abstract thinking and highly principaled individuals…last I heard he walked into the ocean to join the fishes.)

Further research leads me to a fellow researcher Inspector Lohmann . He conducts his bleak investigations in very different ways than I. In this link he explores your question via a minuette: http://inspectorlohmann.blogspot.com/2004/11/martial-minuette-in-minor-key.html

Lohmann's colleagues would say that Diebold fixed the race and that we cannot be certain even that that many did vote that way. Reference any of the following:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0302/S00052.htm
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00227.htm
http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2004/11/now-comes-revolution.html
http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2004/11/dissonantly-cognitive_25.html
http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2004/11/virtual-despotism.html
http://theriverblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/wait-minute-theres-still-this-vote.html

For myself…it is simply the fact that questions like these are all too easy to ask these days that I moved North of the boarder. Though in keeping with my wish to join the rest of humanity in doing the best we can, I do try to do anything I can to instill a more sane way of being than fear based voting even now that I'm a bit out of the fray.

3: If Miss Issippi had a new jersey, what would Della ware?

I'm remember vaguely that Della is of French extraction, if so, then surely she wears Ma chausettes .

8:00 AM  
Blogger Pearl Pocock said...

That really was an assumption about what would Della wares, really, Idaho, Alaska...

8:30 AM  
Blogger Gr8fulTed said...

Bingo!

The answer to the question if Miss Issippi had a new jersey, what would Della wear? Alaska.

8:44 AM  
Blogger Pearl Pocock said...

This was just pushed at me from one of my sources. It may shed some light on question 2: American Samizdat's 20 Amazing facts about voting in the USA.

9:06 AM  
Blogger Gr8fulTed said...

Darn it!

I had another question I was going to ask instead of the Miss Issippi one, but it just left my brain as I was posting the questions. So I went with the Miss Issippi one.

Here it is several days later and the question pops into my head.

What a drag it is getting old....

10:39 PM  
Blogger ambar said...

I am very impressed by your answers. Thanks, you've helped me more than you can imagine. It's a bummer you didn't answer the remaining 2 questions, coz now I REALLY want to know what you'd say to them. I'll soon be bugging you about it on email :)

9:40 AM  
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3:16 PM  

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